English
Related papers

Related papers: Automatic Variational Inference in Stan

200 papers

We propose Diffusion Model Variational Inference (DMVI), a novel method for automated approximate inference in probabilistic programming languages (PPLs). DMVI utilizes diffusion models as variational approximations to the true posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Simon Dirmeier , Fernando Perez-Cruz

We present Sequential Neural Variational Inference (SNVI), an approach to perform Bayesian inference in models with intractable likelihoods. SNVI combines likelihood-estimation (or likelihood-ratio-estimation) with variational inference to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-20 Manuel Glöckler , Michael Deistler , Jakob H. Macke

The steady-state Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) makes it possible to incorporate prior information about the long-run mean of the process. This has been shown in many studies to substantially improve forecasting performance, and the…

Computation · Statistics 2025-06-12 Oskar Gustafsson , Mattias Villani

Distributed inference/estimation in Bayesian framework in the context of sensor networks has recently received much attention due to its broad applicability. The variational Bayesian (VB) algorithm is a technique for approximating…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-30 Junhao Hua , Chunguang Li

We exploit the observation that stochastic variational inference (SVI) is a form of annealing and present a modified SVI approach -- applicable to both large and small datasets -- that allows the amount of annealing done by SVI to be tuned.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-17 John Paisley , Ghazal Fazelnia , Brian Barr

Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (PVI). PVI is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-26 Jaan Altosaar , Rajesh Ranganath , David M. Blei

Envelope models provide a sufficient dimension reduction framework for multivariate regression analysis. Bayesian inference for these models has been developed primarily using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Specifically, Gibbs…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-03 Seunghyeon Kim , Kwangmin Lee , Yeonhee Park

Stochastic variational inference (SVI), the state-of-the-art algorithm for scaling variational inference to large-datasets, is inherently serial. Moreover, it requires the parameters to fit in the memory of a single processor; this is…

Solving Bayesian inference problems approximately with variational approaches can provide fast and accurate results. Capturing correlation within the approximation requires an explicit parametrization. This intrinsically limits this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-31 Jakob Knollmüller , Torsten A. Enßlin

Variational empirical Bayes (VEB) methods provide a practically attractive approach to fitting large, sparse, multiple regression models. These methods usually use coordinate ascent to optimize the variational objective function, an…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-25 Saikat Banerjee , Peter Carbonetto , Matthew Stephens

Amortized variational inference (AVI) replaces instance-specific local inference with a global inference network. While AVI has enabled efficient training of deep generative models such as variational autoencoders (VAE), recent empirical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-25 Yoon Kim , Sam Wiseman , Andrew C. Miller , David Sontag , Alexander M. Rush

Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular and efficient algorithm for Bayesian inference. Despite empirical success, the convergence of this method is still not fully understood. In this work, we define and study…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-02 Thomas Guilmeau , Hadrien Hendrikx , Florence Forbes

The automation of probabilistic reasoning is one of the primary aims of machine learning. Recently, the confluence of variational inference and deep learning has led to powerful and flexible automatic inference methods that can be trained…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-10 Luca Ambrogioni , Gianluigi Silvestri , Marcel van Gerven

The recognition network in deep latent variable models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) relies on amortized inference for efficient posterior approximation that can scale up to large datasets. However, this technique has also been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-28 Rui Shu , Hung H. Bui , Jay Whang , Stefano Ermon

Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is a useful tool for efficiently learning probabilistic models in machine learning. Generally approximate posteriors learned by ADVI are forced to be unimodal in order to facilitate use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Warren R. Morningstar , Sharad M. Vikram , Cusuh Ham , Andrew Gallagher , Joshua V. Dillon

Boosting variational inference (BVI) approximates an intractable probability density by iteratively building up a mixture of simple component distributions one at a time, using techniques from sparse convex optimization to provide both…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-29 Trevor Campbell , Xinglong Li

Variational inference (VI) is a computationally efficient and scalable methodology for approximate Bayesian inference. It strikes a balance between accuracy of uncertainty quantification and practical tractability. It excels at generative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-15 Alex Glyn-Davies , Arnaud Vadeboncoeur , O. Deniz Akyildiz , Ieva Kazlauskaite , Mark Girolami

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of variational inference in latent variable models for survival analysis, emphasizing the distinctive challenges associated with applying variational methods to survival data. We identify a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Chuanhui Liu , Xiao Wang

Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) has been widely applied in large scale Bayesian inference. However MFVI, which assumes a product distribution on the latent variables, often leads to objective functions with many local optima, making…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-03-03 Mingzhang Yin , Y. X. Rachel Wang , Purnamrita Sarkar

Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Chirag Modi , Charles Margossian , Yuling Yao , Robert Gower , David Blei , Lawrence Saul